Under Labour’s plans for a land tax, your property would be assessed on the total amount of land it occupies rather than the value of your house.
Sounds innocuous does’t it?
Think again.
A house worth £250,000 taxed at 1% would attract a bill of £1250 a year.
A house worth £500,000 (based on a land value of £300,000 would be billed for £3000, while houses over £1,000,000 would be billed for between £10,000 and £20,000.
But as Labour plans the rate rises from 1% to 3% over ten years ( which is where Labour is going to get its money from to plug its spending gap) most private property would be become unaffordable.
Council properties would pay nothing.
This is Labour’s secret weapon, the centre point of Momentum’s thinking, to strip the property owning classes of their houses and land, which the State would then buy and hand over to immigrants, the unemployed and their own officials.
Film goers will recall the scene in Dr Zhivago when the doctor returns to his family home in Moscow to find it filled with slum dwellers.
We are accustomed to believe nothing like this could happen here, but the mild mannered bearded gentleman who may be in Downing St next week is determined to break the middle class, and create a workers’ state, without frontiers and without private property.
The problem with this is what happens when you run out of other peoples money ?
The ‘bearded gentleman’ would look for a solution in his much-admired Venezuela and print plane loads of banknotes.